Secret Trojan Network Could Produce Superworm

"The reason why Sinit is quite concerning is that it opens up a port on a machine, much like opening a window in your house," Sharon Ruckman, senior director for security response at Symantec, told TechNewsWorld.

An established, clandestine network of compromised computers could become the launching pad for a superworm that would have a massive impact on the Internet.
The malware network was created by an unpublicized Trojan -- a malicious program that poses as a benign one -- called Sinit, which has already infected hundreds of thousands of computers, according to a report released Monday by Clearswift, a UK-based maker of software for managing and securing communications.

Sinit has created an underground peer-to-peer network that's removed the single point of failure that is often targeted by law enforcers to terminate viruses, the company explained in a statement. With Sinit, there is no central server that can be shut down. Each infected host becomes part of a peer-to-peer network through which additional Trojans can spread.
"It's spooky in the sense that it seems to have the potential for a great deal of malice," Greg Hampton, Clearswift vice president for U.S. marketing, told TechNewsWorld. "How it will be used is still unclear, so we don't want to raise any false alarms." .......

...........Writing malware for financial gain will be a growth business in 2004, according to Central Command's Sundermeier. "We're anticipating an increase in the creation of Internet worms -- maybe in collaboration with spammers or hackers -- in order to have some sort of financial gain," he said.
"In the past, viruses were written for the virus writer's own notoriety," he continued. "Now we're seeing kind of a scary trend toward writing virus code and replication in order to ruin the livelihood of Internet users."